According to legal experts and a court transcript, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee assigned to preside over his case involving classified materials in Florida, made two critical mistakes in a June trial. The transcript revealed that Cannon disallowed a defendant’s family and the general public from jury selection, ostensibly in violation of the right to a public trial guaranteed by the Constitution. According to Reuters, she also skipped the required step of having the prospective jury pool take an oath of truth, which required her to repeat the jury selection process.
Judge Aileen Cannon, who is she?
Aileen Cannon was appointed by Trump to the court in late 2020, and she had previously ruled in his favor in 2022 by ordering the US government to stop using materials that were taken from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Cannon, 42, was born in Cali, Colombia, to a Cuban mother who fled the country as a child during the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s and an American father. Cannon graduated from Duke University with a bachelor’s degree and from the University of Michigan with a law degree.
Since 2005, Cannon has belonged to the Federalist Society. At the request of Republican senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Trump proposed her for the position of judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. In November 2020, she will be approved.
On August 8, 2022, Trump requested the appointment of a special master to review documents obtained during the FBI investigation of Mar-a-Lago in the civil case Trump v. United States, which was presided over by Cannon.
She granted Trump’s request, ordering the Department of Justice to release the previously-sealed list of materials that had been seized and to stop reviewing all information that had been seized. The verdict was appealed by the Department of Justice, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it.
The case was ultimately thrown out by Cannon for lack of jurisdiction. The document seizure at the center of that civil action served as the impetus for the current criminal investigation into Trump, and Cannon is once again serving as the judge.
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